Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Brainstorming has evolved into powerful mindmapping tools that allow real time collaboration over the net. Really useful stuff, but we think it is only the beginning

For many of us, the process of bouncing ideas back and forth is an important part of our social interaction. This idea bouncing has been around for centuries. 17th century coffee houses were the catalyst for ideas as well as a social meeting ground. I suspect examples go back to antiquity.

It is still important today, we are constantly collecting ideas facts and stitching them up later into different conclusions In fact, the unConference is a good example of a similar activity.

In a more modern example, an English mathematician (Timothy Gowers) posted a challenge to the readers of his blog to develop an more elegant proof of a theorem. The process took 6 weeks and was the result of many people building on each others comments until ideas gelled into a solution. A collaborative effort

This was done with nothing more than a stream of comments to a blog.

We have realized social mindmapping is not constrained by the bounds of brainstorming or blogs, it needs some of the properties of both along withcollective intelligence and other techniques.

So we have decided to build a social application to support collaborating on ideas and we have named it the Idea Supercollider. Our goal is to augment the creative process supporting discussions, capturing results and providing a forum for continued work across geographies and timezones.

We will start with something simple, and make it available. We will augment it over time to incorporating what we learn.

We are here today to enlist your help develop our ideas. We have put a lot of thought into the design, but we don’t want to start with that, we want to hear from you. Tell us;

How you might use it?What does it need to do?What should it integrate with?